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On the night of Feb. 24, he’ll be in Los Angeles, as he has been for the past decade, bringing his college-boy charm to eTalk’s pre-show coverage of the Oscars.

This is Mulroney’s 10th year live on the red carpet, his 11th at the Oscars, wedged in between “ABC on one side and E! on the other, two massive American juggernauts with the Canadian guy in the middle. Kind of appropriate, isn’t it?” he asks over lunch at Nota Bene.

And he’s right. Not only is he our own Ryan Seacrest (from Canadian Idol host to entertainment super-journalist) his dad was Brian Mulroney, the prime minister who championed free trade between the U.S. and Canada.

What’s Mulroney the Younger like at 36?

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He’s a regular guy, ready to argue the merits of Toronto’s top burger places (“Don’t say that I have a favourite, but my wife and I love going to Holy Chuck”) with as much passion as he offers his personal political views (“I’m a right-leaning independent. People who believe in a system greater than themselves both confuse me and inspire me.”).

As Oscar night draws near, he shares his mild annoyance that everyone thinks he has such a falling-off-a-log kind of job, but red carpet coverage has its own challenges.

“You can’t move from your spot and when a big star comes along you’ve got to reach out to them with your eyes and hope they remember you. They may remember a face or a logo, but maybe they just remember a feeling. You were the one who made them feel good last year.

“A lot of them are awestruck because it’s their first time. A lot of them know they’re not going to win. Some of them are just there to have fun.”

You have to play a waiting game, especially if you’re not with a big American network.

“Some of them just stand in front of you killing time while they’re waiting to talk to Ryan Seacrest and there’s some who’ll talk to you as long as ABC is on a commercial break.”

But then there’s Oprah Winfrey.

“She showed up in front of me at the beginning of one of our commercial breaks and the guys from E! were trying to get her away from me. She reached out, grabbed my hand and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.’ Then she looked at E! and said, ‘I’ll get to you later on.’

“You try to do something to make them remember you in a good way. One year, I said to George Clooney, ‘Everyone knows you’re up for three Oscars, but most people don’t realize you could have been up for a fourth if you’d accepted the role of June Carter Cash in Walk the Line.’ The look on his face was priceless.”

And sometimes they make Mulroney feel special as well.

“In 2011, Ryan Reynolds came down the carpet and we had a nice chat and then, just as we finished, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Hey, congratulations on the twins!’” referring to the twin sons of Mulroney and his wife Jessica Brownstein, Brian and John, born the previous summer.

“Yeah, that was great,” blushes Mulroney. “It was like, ‘Welcome to the Oscars, dude.’”

Lots of fun times, but does he have darker memories?

“Oh yes, there was Melissa Leo,” he immediately contributes. “A very short interview, but I made three mistakes and she corrected me on each one. That hurts. But it was my fault. I was running behind, I got too busy, I wasn’t prepared.

“And I said to myself, I will never let that happen to me again.”

At a moment like that, Mulroney’s chin sets firmly and he looks like his father, who, by the way, he adores and calls “my absolutely favourite person ever.”

He was 8 years old when his father was elected prime minister in 1984 and he’s nonchalant about that time.

“It was the only life I knew. It was normal to me. Being driven by the RCMP to and from school was par for the course. I went to the Lycée in Ottawa with a lot of kids from the diplomatic corps, so none of them ever came up to me and said ‘My dad thinks your dad stinks’ or anything like that.”

He looks sad for a moment. “But I know the media weren’t particularly kind to my parents. I watched the news on TV, I read the papers. It wasn’t easy on them, but it was the choice they made. Dad told me that. He said, ‘This is what I want to be doing.’”

His son had different plans. “I wanted to be a superhero. I did! My mom has an audio cassette recording of my uncle interviewing me and I say, ‘I want to be Superman and a lawyer if my sister will let me.’”

He went to law school, “but I didn’t get a charge out of it. I didn’t see a future in the law for me.”

Instead, as he says in his self-deprecating way, “I got lucky falling into something for which the kind of people Anderson Cooper calls ‘anonymous Internet trolls’ would say I didn’t have a talented bone in my body.”

In the next moment, however, he grins and says, “But I wouldn’t be celebrating my 12th year in television if I wasn’t contributing something to the company.”

Former CTV programming honcho Susanne Boyce saw Mulroney making an appearance at a Conservative Party policy convention and was impressed by the good-looking, self-possessed, bilingual young man she saw. She flew him to Toronto to audition and the rest is history.

“You see that’s what crazy about my whole life,” laughs Mulroney. “As a kid, I was so shy, my mother sent me to theatre classes to bring me out of myself and now I’m on the Oscars red carpet.”

His personal life followed the same course.

“I had no game whatsoever as a teenager. I had one date. I took a girl from France to see Field of Dreams. In my mind she was 6 feet tall. Afterwards, we went back to 24 Sussex and swam in the pool. Thank you, Pierre Trudeau.

“In my personal life, I was a cross between Paul Rudd from Knocked Up, the guy with a chip on his shoulder unhappy with life, and Hugh Grant from Notting Hill, the bumbling sweet guy who marries the girl of his dreams. Which I did.”

Nearly 20 years after his date-challenged adolescence, he met and married the glamorous and sophisticated Brownstein. “You could say I’m a slow starter. Or incredibly lucky. Or both.”

Mulroney looks around the restaurant, filled with movers and shakers. “You know, we are all so much more than our jobs, no matter what those jobs are. We ought to remember that.”

Final question, who is he most looking forward to meeting on the red carpet this year?

“Hugh Jackman. He’s so great. He’s one of the best looking dudes in the world: he’s Wolverine; he sings and dances; he’s genuinely passionate about his career. He should be looking down on all of us with disdain. But he doesn’t.

“That’s why he’s so great.”

FIVE FAVE PEOPLE

JOHN BRUNTON

“What I admire most about John Brunton, is his passion for making great compelling television. Everything John does, he does well, and he’s brilliant because he loves his craft. He’s a visionary and trailblazer in the business.”

DAVID DANIELS:

“David Daniels has been a friend and champion of mine for years. I have watched as he has nurtured and supported the arts scene and community in Toronto with passion. He is one of the few people who love this city enough to help shape it, and we are all better off because of his efforts.”

SUSANNE BOYCE:

“Susanne Boyce brought me into the world of television and, for that, I will be eternally grateful. She saw in me a potential that I did not know existed and she taught me that big risks often have the greatest rewards.”

MICHAEL COOPER

“He’s not just an exceptionally successful business man, but he’s such a great family man. That’s what I try to emulate in him. You have to love what you do in order to be the best at it. I don’t know anybody who’s at the top of their game and hates their game, and Michael’s at the top of his game.”

RICHARD PLEPLER

“He worked in politics for Senator (Chris) Dodd, he’s met all the most interesting people in America and now he runs its most fascinating television network, HBO. What’s not to admire?”

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